New Folks' Home : And Other Stories

Worrywart

Charley Porter is a copyreader on the Daily Times and a copyreader is a funny kind of critter. He is a comma watcher and a word butcher and a mighty tide of judgment set against the news. He’s a sort of cross between a walking encyclopedia and an ambulatory index.

Occasionally you meet a reporter or an editor or you see their pictures or you hear them spoken of. But you never hear about a copyreader.

The copyreader sits with his fellow copyreaders at a horseshoe-shaped table. If he’s an old time copyreader, like Charley is, he wears a green eyeshade and rolls his shirtsleeves up above his elbows.

Inside the curve of the copydesk sits the man who directs the copyreaders. Since the inside of the desk is known as the slot, this man is called the slot man. To the slot man comes the daily flow of news; he passes the copy to the men around the desk and they edit it and write the headlines.

Because there is always copy enough to fill twenty times the allotted space, the copyreader must trim all the stories and see there is no excess wordage in them. This brings him into continuous collision with reporters, who see their ornately worded stories come out chopped and mangled, although definitely more readable.

When work slacks off in the afternoon, the copyreaders break their silence and talk among themselves. They talk about the news and debate what can be done about it. If you listened to them, not knowing who they were, you’d swear you were listening in on some world commission faced by weighty problems on which life or death depended.

For your copyreader is a worrier. He worries because each day he handles the fresh and bleeding incidents that shape the course of human destiny, and there probably is no one who knows more surely nor feels more keenly the knife-edge balance between survival and disaster.

Charley Porter worried more than most. He worried about a lot of things that didn’t seem to call for worry.

There was the matter, for instance, of those “impossible” stories happening in sequence. The other men on the copydesk took notice of them after two or three had occurred, and talked about them—among themselves, naturally, for no proper copyreader ever talks to anyone but another copyreader. But they passed them off with only casual mention.

Charley worried about the incidents, secretly, of course, since he could see that none of his fellow copyreaders felt them worthy of really serious worry. After he had done a lot of worrying, he began to see some similarity among them, and that was when he really got down on the floor and wrestled with himself.

First there had been the airliner downed out in Utah. Bad weather held up the hunt for it, but finally air searchers spotted the wreckage strewn over half a mountain peak. Airline officials said there was no hope that any had survived. But when the rescuers were halfway to the wreckage, they met the survivors walking out; every single soul had lived through the crash.

Then there was the matter of Midnight, the 64 to 1 shot, winning the Derby.

And, after that, the case of the little girl who didn’t have a chance of getting well. They held a party for her weeks ahead of time so she could have a final birthday. Her picture was published coast to coast and the stories about her made you want to cry and thousands of people sent her gifts and postcards. Then, suddenly, she got well. Not from any new wonder drug or from any new medical technique. She just got well, some time in the night.

A few days later the wires carried the story about old Pal, the coon dog down in Kentucky who got trapped inside a cave. Men dug for days and yelled encouragement. The old dog whined back at them, but finally he didn’t whine any more and the digging was getting mighty hard. So the men heaped boulders into the hole they’d dug and built a cairn. They said pious, angry, hopeless words, then went back to their cabins and their plowing.

The next day old Pal came home. He was a walking rack of bones, but he still could wag his tail. The way he went through a bowl of milk made a man feel good just to see him do it. Everyone agreed that old Pal must finally have found a way to get out by himself.

Except that an old dog buried in a cave for days, getting weaker all the time from lack of food and water, doesn’t find a way to get out by himself.

And little dying girls don’t get well, just like that, in the middle of the night.

And 64 to 1 shots don’t win the Derby.

And planes don’t shatter themselves among the Utah peaks with no one getting hurt at all.

A miracle, sure. Two miracles, even. But not four in a row and within a few weeks of one another.

It took Charley quite a while to establish some line of similarity. When he did, it was a fairly thin line. But thick enough at least, to justify more worry.

The line of similarity was this: All the stories were “running” or developing stories.

There had been a stretch of two days during which the world waited for the facts of the plane crash. It had been known for days before the race that Midnight would run and that he didn’t have a chance. The story of the doomed little girl had been a matter of public interest for weeks. The old coon dog had been in the cave a week or more before the men gave up and went back to their homes.

In each of the stories, the result was not known until some time after the situation itself was known. Until the final fact was actually determined, there existed an infinite number of probabilities, some more probable than others, but with each probability’s having at least a fighting chance. When you flip a dime into the air, there always exists the infinitesimal probability, from the moment you flip it until it finally lands heads or tails, that it will land on edge and stay there. Until the fact that it is heads or tails is established, the probability of its landing on edge continues to remain.

And that was exactly what had happened, Charley told himself: the doubt had been flipped four times, and four times running it had stood on edge.

There was one minor dissimilarity, of course … the plane crash. It didn’t quite fit.

Each event had been a spin of the dime, and while that dime was still in the air, and the public held its breath, a little girl had gotten well, somehow, and a dog had escaped from a cave, somehow, and a 64 to 1 shot had developed whatever short-lived properties of physique and temperament are necessary to make long shots win.

But the plane crash—there had been no thought of it until after the fact. By the time the crash came into the public eye, the dime was down, and what had happened on that mountain peak had already happened, and all the hopes and prayers offered for the safety of the passengers were, actually, retroactive in the face of the enormous probability that all had perished.

Please, let the dog escape. Tonight.

Let the little girl get well. Soon.

Let my long shot come in. Next week.

Let the passengers be alive. Since yesterday.

Somehow the plane crash worried Charley most of all.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, and with no logic whatsoever, the Iranian situation cleared up, just when it began to look as if it might be another Korea.

A few days later Britain announced proudly that it had weathered its monetary storm, that all was well with the sterling bloc, and London would need no further loans.

It took a while for Charley to tie these two stories up with the plane-girl-Derby-hound-dog sequence. But then he saw that they belonged and that was when he remembered something else that might—well, not tie in, exactly—but might have something to do with this extraordinary run of impossibilities.

After work, he went down to the Associated Press office and had an office boy haul out the files, stapled books of carboned flimsies—white flimsies for the A wire, blue flimsies for the B wire, yellow for the sports wire and pink for the market wire. He knew what he was looking for hadn’t come over either the market or the sports wire, so he passed them up and went through the A and B wire sheets story by story.

He couldn’t remember the exact date the story had come over, but he knew it had been since Memorial Day, so he started with the day after Memorial Day and worked forward.

He remembered the incident clearly. Jensen, the slot man, had picked it up and read it through. Then he had laughed and put it on the spike.

One of the others asked: “What was funny, Jens?”

So Jensen took the story off the spike and threw it over to him. It had gone the rounds of the desk, with each man reading it, and finally it had got back to the spike again.

And that had been the last of it. For the story was too wacky for any newsman to give a second glance. It had all the earmarks of the phony.

Charley didn’t find what he was looking for the first day, although he worked well into the evening—so he went back the next afternoon, and found it.

It was out of a little resort town up in Wisconsin, and it told about an invalid named Cooper Jackson who had been bedridden since he was two or three years old. The story said that Cooper’s old man claimed that Cooper could foresee things, that he would think of something or imagine something during the evening and the next day it would happen. Things like Linc Abrams’ driving his car into the culvert at Trout Run and coming out all right himself, but with the car all smashed to flinders, and like the Reverend Amos Tucker’s getting a letter from a brother he hadn’t heard from in more than twenty years.

The next day Charley spoke to Jensen.

“I got a few days coming,” he said, “from that time I worked six-day weeks last fall, and I still got a week of last year’s vacation you couldn’t find the room for …”

“Sure, Charley,” Jensen said. “We’re in good shape right now.”

Two days later Charley stepped off the milk-run train in the little resort town in Wisconsin. He went to one of the several cabin camps down on the lake that fronted the town and got himself a small, miserable cabin for which he paid an exorbitant price. And it wasn’t until then that he dared let himself think—really think—of the reason he had come there.

In the evening he went uptown and spent an hour or two standing around in the general store and the pool room. He came back with the information that he had set out for, and another piece of information he had not been prepared to hear.

The first piece of information, the one he had gone out to get, was that Dr. Erik Ames was the man to see. Doc Ames, it appeared, was not only the doctor and the mayor of the town, but the acknowledged civic leader, sage and father confessor of the whole community.

The second piece of information, one which had served the town as a conversation piece for the last two months, was that Cooper Jackson, after years of keeping to his bed as a helpless invalid, now was on his feet. He had to use a cane, of course, but he got around real well and every day he took a walk down by the lake.

They hadn’t said what time of day, so Charley was up early in the morning and started walking up and down the lakeshore, keeping a good lookout. He talked with the tourists who occupied the other cabins and he talked with men who were setting out for a day of fishing. He spent considerable time observing a yellow-winged blackbird that had its nest somewhere in a bunch of rushes on a marshy spit.

Cooper Jackson finally came early in the afternoon, hobbling along on his cane, with a peaked look about him. He walked along the shore for a ways; then sat down to rest on a length of old dead tree that had been tossed up by a storm.

Charley ambled over. “Do you mind?” he asked, sitting down beside him.

“Not at all,” said Cooper Jackson. “I’m glad to have you.”

They talked. Charley told him that he was a newspaperman up there for a short vacation and how it was good to get away from the kind of news that came over the teletypes, and how he envied the people who could live in this country all the year around.

When he heard Charley was a newspaperman, Cooper’s interest picked up like a hound dog cocking its ears. He began to ask all sorts of questions, the kind of questions that everyone asks a newspaperman whenever he can corner one.

What do you think of the situation and what can be done about it and is there any chance of preventing war and what should we do to prevent a war … and so on until you think you’ll scream.

Except that it seemed to Charley that Cooper’s questions were a bit more incisive, backed by a bit more information than were the questions of the ordinary person. He seemed to display more insistence and urgency than the ordinary person, who always asked his questions in a rather detached, academic way.

Charley told him, honestly enough, that he didn’t know what could be done to prevent a war, although he said that the quieting of the Iranian situation and the British monetary announcement might go a long way toward keeping war from happening.

“You know,” said Cooper Jackson, “I felt the same way, too. That is, after I read the news, I felt that those were two good things to happen.”

At this point, perhaps, a couple of things should be considered.

If Charley Porter had been a regular newspaperman instead of copyreader, he might have mentioned the plane wreck and the little girl who hadn’t died, and how it was a funny thing about that coon dog getting out of the cave and how he knew of a man who’d made a mint of money riding in on Midnight.

But Charley didn’t say these things.

If Charley had been a regular newspaperman, he might have said to Cooper Jackson: “Look here, kid, I’m on to you. I know what you’re doing. I got it figured out. Maybe you better straighten me out on a point or two, so I’ll have the story right.”

But Charley didn’t say this. Instead he said that he had heard uptown the night before about Cooper’s miraculous recovery, and he was Cooper Jackson, wasn’t he?

Yes, Cooper answered, he was Cooper Jackson, and perhaps his recovery was miraculous. No, he said, he didn’t have the least idea of how it came about and Doc Ames didn’t either.

They parted after an hour or two of talk. Charley didn’t say anything about seeing him again. But the next day Cooper came limping down to the beach and headed for the log, and Charley was waiting for him.

That was the day Cooper gave Charley his case history. He had been an invalid, he said, from as far back as he could remember, although his mother had told him it hadn’t happened until he was three years old.

He liked to listen to stories, and the stories that his parents and his brothers and sisters told him and read to him were what had kept him alive, he was certain, during those first years. For he made the stories work for him.

He told how he made the characters—Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man and Little Bo Peep and all the rest of them—keep on working overtime after he had heard the stories. He would lie in bed, he said, and relive the stories over and over again.

“But after a while, those stories got pretty threadbare. So I improved on them. I invented stories. I mixed up the characters. For some reason or other Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man always were my heroes. They would go on the strangest odysseys and meet all these other characters, and together they would have adventures that were plain impossible.

“Except,” he added, “they never seemed impossible to me.”

Finally he had got to be the age where kids usually start off to school. Cooper’s Ma had begun to worry about what they should do for his education. But Doc Ames, who was fairly sure Cooper wouldn’t live long enough for an education to do him any good, had advised that they teach him whatever he might be interested in learning. It turned out that about all Cooper was interested in was reading. So they taught him how to read. Now he didn’t have to have anyone read him stories any more, but could read them for himself. He read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Lewis Carroll’s works and a lot of other books.

So now he had more characters and Peter Rabbit had some rather horrible moments reconciling his world with the world of Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Mock Turtle. But he finally worked in, and the imagined adventuring got crazier and crazier.

“It’s a wonder,” said Cooper Jackson, “that I didn’t die laughing. But to me it wasn’t funny. It was dead serious.”

“What do you read now, Cooper?” Charley asked.

“Oh, the newspapers,” Cooper said, “and the news magazines and stuff like that.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Charley explained. “What do you read for relaxation? What takes the place of Peter Rabbit?”

Cooper hemmed and hawed a little and finally he admitted it.

“I read science fiction. I ran onto it when someone brought me a magazine six or seven years ago … no, I guess it’s more like eight.”

“I read the stuff myself,” said Charley, to put him at his ease.

So they sat the rest of the afternoon and talked of science fiction.

That night Charley Porter lay in his bed in the little lakeshore cabin, staring into the darkness, trying to understand how it must have been for Cooper Jackson, lying there all those years, living with the characters out of children’s books and later out of boys’ books and then out of science fiction.

He had said that he’d never been in much pain, but sometimes the nights were long and it was hard to sleep, and that was how he’d got started with his imagining. He would imagine things to occupy his mind.

At first, it was just a mental exercise, saying such and such a thing is happening now and going on from there to some other thing that was happening. But after a while he began to see an actual set of characters acting on an imaginary stage, faint and fuzzy characters going through their parts. They were nebulous at first; later on, they became gray, like little skipping ghosts; then they had achieved the sharpness of black and white. About the time he began to deal with Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe, the characters and background had begun to take on color and perspective.

And from Huck Finn and Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, he had gone on to science fiction.

Good Lord, thought Charley Porter. He went on to science fiction.

Take an invalid who had never moved out of his bed, who had never had a formal education, who knew little and cared less about the human viewpoint, give him an overwrought imagination and turn him loose on science fiction—and what have you got?

Charley lay there in the darkness and tried to put himself into the place of Cooper Jackson. He tried to imagine what Cooper might have imagined, what far adventuring he might have embarked upon.

Then let the same invalid suddenly become aware of the world around him, as Cooper had—for now he read the newspapers and the news magazines. Let him see what kind of shape the world was in.

What might happen then?

You’re crazy, Charley told himself. But he lay for a long time, looking up into the black, before he went to sleep.

Cooper seemed to like him, and they spent a part of each day together. They talked about science fiction and the news of the day and what should be done to ensure world peace. Charley told him he didn’t know what should be done, that a lot of men much smarter than he were working full time on it, and they had found no answer yet.

“Someone,” said Cooper, “must do something about it.” And the way he said it, you would have sworn that he was going to set out any minute to do that very thing.

So Charley went to call on old Doc Ames.

“I’ve heard of you,” the doctor told him. “Coop was telling me about you just the other day.”

“I’ve been spending a little time with Cooper,” Charley said, “and I’ve wanted to ask him something, but I haven’t done it.”

“I know. You wanted to ask him about the story that was in the papers here a few months back.”

“That’s right,” Charley agreed. “And I wanted to ask him, too, about how he got up and walked after all those years in bed.”

“You’re looking for a story?” asked the doctor.

“No,” said Charley, “I’m not looking for a story.”

“You’re a newspaperman.”

“I came for a story,” Charley told him. “But not any more. Right now I’m … well, I’m sort of scared.”

“So am I.”

“If what I’m thinking is right, it’s too big to be a story.”

“I hope,” said Doc, “that both of us are wrong.”

“He’s hell bent,” Charley went on, “to bring peace to the world. He’s asked me about it a dozen times in a dozen different ways. I’ve told him I don’t know, and I don’t think there’s anyone who does.”

“That’s the trouble. If he’d just stick to things like that lost plane out in Utah and the hound dog down in Kentucky, it might be all right.”

“Did he tell you about those things, Doc?”

“No,” said Doc, “he didn’t really tell me. But he said wouldn’t it be fine if all those people in the plane should be found alive, and he did a lot of fretting about that poor trapped dog. He likes animals.”

“I figure he just practiced up on a few small items,” Charley suggested, “to find if he could do it. He’s out for big game now.”

Then good, solid, common sense came back to him and he said: “But, of course, it isn’t possible.”

“He’s got help,” said Doc. “Hasn’t he told you about the help he’s got?”

Charley shook his head.

“He doesn’t know you well enough. I’m the only one he knows well enough to tell a thing like that.”

“He’s got help? You mean someone’s helping … ?”

“Not someone,” said Doc. “Something.”

Then Doc told Charley what Cooper had told him.

It had started four or five years before, shortly after he’d gone on his science fiction binge. He’d built himself an imaginary ship that he took out into space. First he’d traveled around our own Solar System—to Mars and Venus and all the others. Then, tiring of such backyard stuff, he had built in a gadget that gave his ship speed in excess of light and had gone out to the stars. He was systematic about it; you had to say that much for him. He worked things out logically, and he didn’t skip around. He’d land on a certain planet and give that planet the full treatment before he went on to the next one.

Somewhere along the way, he picked himself up a crew of companions, most of which were only faintly humanoid, if at all.

And all the time this space-world, this star-world, got clearer and sharper and more real. It almost got to the point where he lived in its reality rather than in the reality of the here and now.

The realization that someone else had joined him, that he had picked up from somewhere a collaborator in his fantasies, began first as a suspicion, finally solidified into certainty. The fantasies got into the habit of not going as he himself was imagining them; they were modified, and added to, and changed in other ways. Cooper didn’t mind though, for generally they were better than anything he could think up by himself—and finally he had grown to know his collaborators—not one of them alone, but three of them, each a separate entity. After the first shocks of recognition, the four of them got along just swell.

“You mean he knows these others—these helpers?”

“He knows them all right,” said Doc. “Which doesn’t mean, of course, that he has ever seen them or will ever see them.”

“You believe this, Doc?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. But I do know Coop, and I know that he got up and walked. There is no medical science … no human medical science … that would have made him walk.”

“You think these helpers, these collaborators of his, might somehow have cured him?”

“Something did.”

“One thing haunts me,” said Charley. “Is Cooper Jackson sane?”

“Probably,” answered Doc, “he’s the sanest man on Earth.”

“And the most dangerous.”

“That’s what worries me. I watch him the best I can. I see him every day …”

“How many others have you told?” asked Charley.

“Not a soul,” said Doc.

“How many are you going to tell?”

“None. Probably I shouldn’t have told you, but you already knew part of it. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going home,” said Charley. “I’m going to go home and keep my mouth shut.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else. If I were a praying man, I think I’d do some praying.”

He went home and kept his mouth shut and did a lot of worrying. He wondered whether, praying man or not, he should not try a prayer or two. But when he did, the prayers sounded strange and out of place coming from his lips, so he figured he’d better leave well enough alone.

At times it still seemed impossible. At other times it seemed crystal clear that Cooper Jackson actually could will an event to happen—that by thinking so, he could make it so. But mostly, because he knew too much to think otherwise, Charley knew that the whole thing was true. Cooper Jackson had spent twenty years or so in thinking and imagining, his thoughts and imaginings shaped, not by the course of human events, but by the fantasy of many human minds. He would not think as a normal human being thought, and therein lay both an advantage and a danger.

If he did not think in entirely human channels, he also was not trammeled by the limitations of human thinking; he was free to let his mind wander out in strange directions and bend its energies to strange tasks. His obsession with the necessity of achieving lasting peace was an example of his unhuman attitude; for, while the entire Earth did earnest lip service to the cause of peace, the threat of war had hung over every one so long that its horror had been dulled. But to Cooper Jackson, it was unthinkable that men should slay one another by the millions.

Always Charley came back to those helpers, those three shadowy figures he pictured as standing at Cooper Jackson’s shoulder. He assigned them three arbitrary faces, but the faces would not stay as he imagined them. At last he understood that they were things to which you could assign no face.

But the thing that he still worried most about, although he tried not to think of it at all because of its enormity, was the Utah plane crash.

The plane had crashed before Cooper, or anyone else, could have known it was about to crash. Whatever had happened to the people in the plane had happened then, in that one split second when plane and peak had touched—had happened without benefit of the magic of Cooper Jackson’s wishful thinking. And to imagine that, without such benefit, the passengers and crew could have escaped unscathed was nothing short of madness. It just couldn’t have happened that way.

And that meant that Cooper not only could make something turn out the way he wanted it to turn out, but that he also could go back through time and undo something that was already done! Either that, or he could bring dead people back to life, reassembling their shattered bodies and making them whole again, and that was even madder than to think that his wishful thinking might be retroactive.

Whenever Charley thought about that, the sweat would start out on him and he’d think about Britain and Iran and once again he would see Cooper’s face, all puckered up with worry about what the world was coming to.

He watched the news more closely than he had ever watched it, analyzing each unexpected turn in it, searching for the clue that might suggest some harebrained scheme to Cooper Jackson, trying to think the way Cooper might think, but feeling fairly sure that he wasn’t even coming close.

He had his bags packed twice to go to Washington—but each time he unpacked them and put away his clothes and shoved the bags back into the closet.

For he realized there was no use going to Washington, or anywhere else for that matter.

“Mr. President, I know a man who can bring peace to the world …”

They’d throw him out before he had the sentence finished.

He called Doc Ames, and Doc told him that everything was all right, that Cooper had bought a lot of back-issue science fiction magazines and was going through them, cataloguing story themes and variant ideas. He seemed happy in this pastime and calmer than he’d been for weeks.

When Charley hung up, he found that his hands were shaking and he suddenly was cold all over, for he felt positive that he knew what Cooper was doing with those piles of magazines.

He sat in the one comfortable chair in his rented room and thought furiously, turning over and over the plots that he had run across in his science fiction reading. While there were some that might apply, he rejected them because they didn’t fit into the pattern of his fear.

It wasn’t until then that he realized he’d been so busy worrying about Cooper that he hadn’t been paying attention to the recent magazines. Cold fear gripped him that there might be something in the current issues that might apply most neatly.

He’d have to buy all the magazines he could find, and give them a good, fast check.

But he got busy at one thing and another and it was almost a week before he got around to buying them. By that time his fear had subsided to some extent. Trudging home with the magazines clutched beneath his arm, he decided that he would put aside his worry for one night at least and read for enjoyment.

That evening he settled himself in the comfortable chair and stacked the magazines beside him. He took the first one off the top of the stack and opened it, noting with some pleasure that the lead-off story was by a favorite author.

It was a grim affair about an Earthman holding an outpost against terrific odds. He read the next one … about a starship that hit a space warp and got hurled into another universe.

The third was about the Earth being threatened by a terrible war and how the hero solved the crisis by bringing about a condition which outlawed electricity, making it impossible in the Universe. Without electricity, planes couldn’t fly and tanks couldn’t move and guns couldn’t be sighted in, so there was no war.

Charley sat in the chair like a stricken man. The magazine dropped from his fingers to the floor and he stared across the room at the opposite wall with terror in his eyes, knowing that Cooper Jackson would have read that story, too.

After a while Charley got up and telephoned Doc.

“I’m worried, Charley,” Doc told him. “Coop has disappeared.”

“Disappeared!”

“We’ve tried to keep it quiet. Didn’t want to stir up any fuss—the way Coop is and all. There might be too many questions.”

“You’re looking for him?”

“We’re looking for him,” Doc said, “as quietly as we can. We have scoured the countryside and we’ve sent out wires to police officials and missing person bureaus.”

“You’ve got to find him, Doc!”

“We’re doing all we can.” Doc sounded tired and a bit bewildered.

“But where could he have gone?” asked Charley. “He doesn’t have any money, does he? He can’t stay hiding out too long without …”

“Coop can get money any time he wants it. He can get anything he wants any time he wants it.”

“I see what you mean,” said Charley.

“I’ll keep in touch,” said Doc.

“Is there anything …?”

“Not a thing,” said Doc. “Not a thing that anyone can do. We can wait. That’s all.”

That was months ago, and Charley is still waiting.

Cooper’s still missing and there’s no trace of him.

So Charley waits and worries.

And the thing he worries about is Cooper’s lack of a formal education, his utter lack of certain basic common knowledge.

There is one hope, of course—that Cooper, if and when he decides to act, will make his action retroactive, going back in time to outlaw not electricity itself, but Man’s discovery of electricity. For, disrupting and terrible as that might be, it would be better than the other way.

But Charley’s afraid that Cooper won’t see the necessity for retroactive action. He’s afraid that Cooper won’t realize that, when you outlaw electricity, you can’t limit it to the current that runs through a wire to light a lamp or turn an engine. When you rule out electricity as a natural phenomenon, you rule out all electricity, and that means you rule out an integral part of atomic structure. And that you affect not only this Earth but the entire Universe.

So Charley sits and worries and waits for the flicker of the lamp beside his chair.

Although he realizes, of course, that when it comes there won’t be any flicker.